Jim Harrison - Legends of the Fall

Amador was plainly stymied and hated to admit it, though he knew Cochran understood. Amador had a passing acquaintance with Tiburón for a decade and considered him a master criminal of superlative wit and taste. He never admired Tiburón's wealth—there were many wealthy fools among the Americans whose property he protected—but he was a little envious of the man's consummate skills at engineering big deals to the extent that he no longer had to trifle with the filth of his past. To Amador, finding Miryea was another instance of Tiburón's wit: the woman had apparently disappeared from earth in a less than immaculate ascension. Wiped out. Erased. And not among all of Amador's reliable connections was there a whisper or shred of evidence to trace her whereabouts. Amador would not have been surprised if she had been dropped down some fathomless, abandoned mine shaft, or lay bound in a bag of rocks at the bottom of a mountain lake. He said so to Cochran who merely nodded in stony agreement one late evening when they had had a great deal to drink.

The cover for Cochran's visit was quickly becoming exhausted. They had visited every available ranch for sale in the area, heard every imaginable spiel from the film commission people on the advantages of the Durango area, visited every antiqued and genuinely bedraggled movie set from the past—at best a haunting procedure where movies from the past were recognized and the past that went along with the movies emerged from its peculiar tunnel. They had gone to a daffy cocktail party given by the movie people on one of the sets, with a lavish buffet table set up, and a mariachi band. The liquor flowed and the campesinos watched with curiosity from a polite distance. The actress-model had become angry with Cochran's indifference which she believed had to be feigned. On the drive home with Amador after the party Cochran suggested morosely that they go to Tepehuanes and blow Tibey out of his socks with the Ruger 30.06 that Amador kept in the truck. It would be fun, Cochran said, to watch the motherfucker buck and somersault through the air with half his head disintegrating into separate pieces of meat.

"Then you would never find her," Amador said.

"You're right, friend. I am only exercising my fantasy life. I see him in the crosshairs of a scope when I don't even want to shoot him. I want to take her away. That's it. Plain and simple."

"If she's alive."

"I'll have to ask you not to mention that possibility."

"I'm sorry, friend." Then Amador smiled at how he had put a roast piglet left untouched at the buffet under his arm and had given it to an old man beyond the fence. The old man would have a happy night of indigestion.

A few days later Amador said that there was gossip about his continuing presence in Durango. They sat drinking coffee by the pool trying to concoct additional plans: the last of the bribes had been paid fruitlessly to the former madam who had been traced to Mazatlán. She had invented a tale that had sent them eagerly all the way to Zacatecas to the frowsiest pigsty of an address. The trip kept reemerging in pieces; a half-comic nightmare, a costume mission of terror on a side street in a slum.

When they finally had found the whorehouse Cochran became uncontainable. Amador held the madam and two pimps at bay in a dimly lit hallway while Cochran methodically kicked in a half-dozen doors in a state of whirling whiteness, so that the gun he held on the occupants held a terror beyond a simple gun: its owner had become red-eyed, utterly berserk. When he reached the last door he somehow believed Miryea had to be there and when the whore was found facedown beneath a shocked fat man, the man was uprooted from his perch and flung into a corner. Cochran turned the head of the comatose whore revealing the blunt face of an Indian woman in her forties and he howled then, running from the room. He set upon the pimps until Amador restrained him. Amador knew by then they had been duped and on the way back home he was wordless in his anger and drank deeply, a rarity for him. Cochran sat massaging his foot and ankle against the dashboard in his private agonies which included a sense of defeat, however momentary, that had taken over the marrow in his bones. In this state he had decided to sneak away from Amador, drive to Tepehuanes and shoot Tibey. (That very evening Tibey had dressed a peasant girl in a dress of Miryea's and then hurled her out of the house in disgust. His drunken regret made him sleepless and he wandered around his property in the waning moon until he wrapped himself in a horse blanket and slept with his bird dogs.) In private, Amador was planning the capture of Tiburón's headman, the man who had replaced The Elephant after his death. But that would be a last-ditch effort, a gesture of panic. Amador owned a Latin patience not possessed in any degree by Cochran. He let grudges pass for years until the appropriate time came to relieve himself of their burden. But now he needed to buy more time.

"You must have that beautiful actress over for dinner. Then everyone in town will think you are just another rich Spanish nitwit trying to relieve the pressure in his balls." Amador was pleased with his idea.

Cochran looked up at the elongated cirrus clouds that reminded him of what it must be like to be inside the skeleton of a whale. He agreed with Amador though he felt curiously sexless. A half hour after he gutted the big man and was driving down the road in the Texan's pickup he had felt an immediate lust for a girl standing under a tree by the side of the road but had been mildly embarrassed. In Da Nang after washing off the reeking sweat of a mission he had enjoyed whores who fixed a meal before he bedded them. Without at least a glimmer of the illusion of the romantic he felt dead sexually, and had since the age of thirty when in a state of depression he vowed not to sleep with a woman he did not want to talk to, eye to eye, at breakfast. He was so much more sophisticated in human-sexual terms than he had ever, until Miryea, had an opportunity to show. Without really thinking about it he had traveled unreturnably far from the glandular collisions of popular culture. He was immersed in love distant from the technical strenuosities of what had become a belabored map of sexual ecology where the proper steps yielded everything and nothing. A man who had been ineluctably married to fatality on a basis far surpassing that of ordinary domesticity did not want to piss away his life on nonsense. And he felt the generalized fearfulness of his approaching age: Miryea seemed transparently his first, last and only shot at filling his life to a fullness that everything else could only dimly suggest. If you added it up, without her there was nothing—but with her even the simplest gestures of walking a bird dog in the desert, or selecting the ingredients for a meal for two rather than one took on an ineffable charm. One evening she had brought over a half-dozen types of fish and shellfish to make a Malaga seafood stew, not forgetting a pound of fresh ground beef for Doll who had been charmed away from her usual indifference to women. Cochran sat there through the afternoon staring at the clouds, letting the sun burn him while Amador's mother brought him a succession of cold drinks and snacks which he left for the appetites of the flies.

Amador had gone off rather happily to invite the actress-model for dinner, stopping at a florist's for a dozen roses, also at an amused drug wholesaler to shop for what he was sure was included in an actress's pharmacopoeia: some spectacular marijuana and at least serviceable to strong cocaine. He needed to arrange this repast to buy time. His friend had shown him the cigar box and had given him five thousand dollars as a gift for starters. Amador wished to add to his small ranch in the foothills where he raised a few cattle and knew the ease and sweetness that had only been occasional since his youth.